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Talk:Roberta Brown
I guess this is as good a time as any to bring this up. The inclusion of the line (Confederate States 1861-1865) in the Nationality section of various historical figures' infoboxes never fails to bug me. Remember, secession is and has always been unconstitutional, and there was not a single person in the world who granted the CSA diplomatic recognition while acting in any official capacity. True, that rebel organization did--irregularly--function in ways that bore some resemblance to the ways real national governments function, but that's true of all sorts of illegitimate regimes all through history. For instance, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would tell you that he stopped being an Iraqi citizen in 2014, in favor of his new nationality of ISIL. We would certainly not legitimate such a claim. And what was the CSA if not the ISIL of its day? We must avoid any appearance of tacitly recognizing Confederate nationhood. (Obviously this does not apply to AH sections of these infoboxes.) Turtle Fan (talk) 06:54, June 8, 2016 (UTC) I want to make sure this doesn't get lost. I do think it's important. Turtle Fan (talk) 07:10, June 9, 2016 (UTC) :I think the fact that they defined themselves as citizens of the CS is critical--international recognition is useful, but certainly not the be-all-end-all. For a period of nearly 5 years, these people perceived themselves as citizens of a new country. In the end, that country was stillborn, and no government outside of Richmond really gave them credence, but for them, yes, they were citizens of that country until it became clear the could no longer claim otherwise. Or, to use your example, ISIL has been told by numerous entities they aren't legitimate. Al-Baghdadi doesn't really care, and acts accordingly (although, off the top of my head, Richmond looked a lot more like a functional country at its worst than ISIL does at its best). TR (talk) 14:53, June 9, 2016 (UTC) ::Well you know how bad Richmond was at its worse. But even in its salad days its nationhood looked pretty tenuous: It barely controlled its ports of entry, conscription officers and tax collectors faced so much violent resistance that they often couldn't function, and governors like Zeb Vance and Joe Brown held Davis's authority in hardly any more regard than Lincoln's. They had federal lawmakers, but never got around to setting up a federal court system, and their currency was always a joke (though that last has been true of a number of otherwise-functional states as well). Not withstanding Gladstone's ill-advised comment, it's really only the Lost Cause mythologizers who have convinced history that the CSA was a fully functioning nation-state, and over the last year I've become more and more convinced of the need to challenge that narrative wherever it may be found. But even if that weren't so, the legal reality is that their so-called nation never existed, and tacitly implying that it did is a great disservice to the heroes who risked and sacrificed so much to ensure that it did not. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:18, June 9, 2016 (UTC)